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Less is sometimes more; InfoSec’s role in the business

I read an excellent article the other day from a LinkedIn reference talking about how laziness can be an effective approach to productivity. It dispelled the myth that “leaning in” when applying yourself to your job isn’t always required to do a good job. There is no need to get up at 04:30hrs to get your morning yoga done before getting to the office at 06:00 and working through the next fourteen hours. it even makes mention of an old Prussian army management matrix that made use of this concept. It reminds me of a Bill Gate’s quote (although it sounds like Steve Jobs!):

I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it

When put like that it sounds right, and yet the concept of using a lazy person seems counterintuitive. Perhaps we should replace lazy with “busy”, or “time poor”, but I think the point is well made nonetheless.

It reminded me of when I wast first put in charge of an information security project to ascertain the organizations level of exposure to personally Identifiable Information (PII). There had been a number of high profile breaches in the media, and the leadership was concerned about how many records we had access to and what we were doing about it. My approach was to work with a very talented team of junior infosec professionals, and we came up with an amazing spreadsheet that tracked every facet of what we thought we might need with, with macros and reporting buttons, lovely color scheme etc. We even tried to make it as friendly as possible as the trick up our sleeve was that we would be asking 95% of the organisation to fill this in themselves (and therefore saving on high labour costs to get this done). The other 5% were the very risky ones we already knew, so they got a personal visit from us to make them feel really special!

After a month of pushing, chasing and cajoling, our completion rate was something like 13%, and we were just a few days away from our deadline. Senior management were not happy, and demanded a full review. The career dissipation light started blinking in my peripheral vision.

We were trying to be far too clever for our own good, far too detailed, we wanted to cross EVERY i and dot EVERY t, whatever the cost to the project and the business. We were detail oriented and were going to get the most accurate report this company had ever seen. Except we didn’t. I was clearly told in no uncertain terms that I had completely misunderstood the business, how busy they were, how finite detail wasn’t what was at stake but getting a good idea of the scale of the problem was, and also to understand that people are generally doing their best to protect the company and were not in the habit of hiding the sort of activities we were doing our best to uncover.

We reduced the 154 question spreadsheet to 10 questions, some of which were voluntary. They were the the most important questions we had to ask, and we subsequently got the data we needed in a little over three weeks for roughly 97% of the organisation (you can’t help some people unfortunately). I managed to keep my job.

Perhaps it is our backgrounds in audit and compliance, but we infosec professionals love our checklists, our questions, our matrices and black and white answers to really drill down to the finite detail. That is not to say that at times they are not important – a good penetration test does need to be detailed and very complete, but that is mainly because the expectation of it being so. It wouldn’t surprise me though if 20% of a pen test uncovers 80% of the vulnerabilities. Vendor security questionnaires, risk assessments, audits, project or team reviews etc., can all potentially be done just as effectively with an element of brevity. Understanding what is important to the business and not to the security function is key here. If infinitesimal detail is important to the business then by all means go for, just ensure that is what the business really is after. most of the time they just need a reasonable picture.

Creating barriers to the successful adoption of security practices by using fifty page reference documents, or encouraging people to work around a security risk because doing the right thing involves sign off from six different gatekeepers is not a recipe for success as it puts the organization in direct opposition to the security function. By making sure that checklists and questionnaires are focussed, relevant and to the point will only encourage people to adopt the security measure that matter because there is clear benefit for a small amount of input.

We have all got better things to do with our time than collate thousands of questions that we have insisted are answered in order to ensure that the ultimate security objectives have been met. In some instances there may be value in that, but in the majority of cases I would wager there is none.

And besides, the rugby/cricket/baseball* match is on this afternoon, so we need to leave early to catch the game.